DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Learning to love torture, Zero
Dark Thirty-style By Karen
J Greenberg
On January 11, 11 years to the
day after the George W Bush administration opened
its notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's deeply
flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden,
opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors
are evidently ignorant of the significance of the
date - a perfect indication of the carelessness
and thoughtlessness of the film, which will
unfortunately substitute for actual history in the
minds of many Americans.
The sad fact is
that Zero Dark Thirty could have been
written by the tight circle of national security
advisors who counseled
president George W Bush to
create the post-9/11 policies that led to
Guantanamo, the global network of borrowed "black
sites" that added up to an offshore universe of
injustice, and the grim torture practices -
euphemistically known as "enhanced interrogation
techniques" - that went with them.
It's
also a film that those in the Barack Obama
administration who have championed
non-accountability for such shameful policies
could and (evidently did) get behind. It might as
well be called Back to the Future, Part IV,
for the film, like the country it speaks to, seems
stuck forever in that timewarp moment of revenge
and hubris that swept the country just after 9/11.
As its core, Bigelow's film makes the
bald-faced assertion that torture did help the
United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11.
Zero Dark Thirty - for anyone who doesn't
know by now - is the story of Maya (Jessica
Chastain), a young Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) agent who believes that information from a
detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden.
After weeks, maybe months of torture, he
does indeed provide a key bit of information that
leads to another piece of information that
leads... well, you get the idea. Eventually, the
name of bin Laden's courier is revealed. From the
first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself
to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to
the compound where bin Laden is hiding. Of course,
you know how it all ends.
However
compelling the heroine's determination to find bin
Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought
in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the
Bush administration and its apologists. It's as if
she had followed an old government memo and
decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step
instructions for the creation, implementation, and
selling of Bush-era torture and detention
policies.
Here, then, are the seven steps
that bring back the Bush administration and should
help Americans learn how to love torture,
Bigelow-style.
First, rouse
fear: From its opening scene, Zero Dark
Thirty equates our post-9/11 fears with the
need for torture. The movie begins in darkness
with the actual heartbreaking cries and screams
for help of people trapped inside the towers of
the World Trade Center: "I'm going to die, aren't
I?... It's so hot. I'm burning up..." a female
voice cries out. As those voices fade, the black
screen yields to a full view of Ammar being
roughed up by men in black ski masks and then
strung up, arms wide apart.
The sounds of
torture replace the desperate pleas of the
victims. "Is he ever getting out?" Maya asks.
"Never," her close CIA associate Dan (Jason
Clarke) answers. These are meant to be words of
reassurance in response to the horrors of 9/11.
Bigelow's first step, then, is to echo former
vice-president Dick Cheney's mantra from that
now-distant moment in which he claimed the nation
needed to go to "the dark side". That was part of
his impassioned demand that, given the immense
threat posed by al-Qaeda, going beyond the law was
the only way to seek retribution and security.
Bigelow also follows Cheney's lead into a
world of fear. The Bush administration understood
that, for their global dreams, including a future
invasion of Iraq, to become reality, fear was
their best ally. From Terre Haute to El Paso,
Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, Americans
were to be regularly reminded that they were
deeply and eternally endangered by terrorists.
Bigelow similarly keeps the fear monitor
bleeping whenever she can. Interspersed with the
narrative of the bin Laden chase, she provides
often blood-filled footage from terrorist attacks
around the globe in the decade after 9/11: the
2004 bombings of oil installations in Khobar,
Saudi Arabia, that killed 22; the 2005 suicide
bombings in London that killed 56; the 2008
Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad that killed 54
people; and the thwarted Times Square bombing of
May 2010. We are in constant jeopardy, she wants
us to remember, and uses Maya to remind us of this
throughout.
Second, undermine the
law: Torture is illegal under both US and
international law. It was only pronounced "legal"
in a series of secret memorandums produced by the
Bush Justice Department and approved at the
highest levels of the administration. (Top
officials, including Cheney and National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, evidently even had
torture techniques demonstrated for them in the
White House before green-lighting them.)
Maintaining that there was no way Americans could
be kept safe via purely legal methods, they asked
for and were given secret legal authority to make
torture the go-to option in their Global War on
Terror.
Yet Bigelow never even nods toward
this striking rethinking of the law. She assumes
the legality of the acts she portrays up close and
personal, only hedging her bets toward the movie's
end when she indicates in passing that the legal
system was a potential impediment to getting bin
Laden. "Who the hell am I supposed to ask [for
confirmation about the courier], some guy at Gitmo
who's all lawyered up?" asks Obama's national
security advisor in the filmic run-up to the raid.
Just as new policies were put in place to
legalize torture, so the detention of terror
suspects without charges or trials (including
people who, we now know, were treated horrifically
despite being innocent of anything) became a
foundational act of the administration.
Specifically, government lawyers were employed to
create particularly tortured (if you'll excuse the
word) legal documents exempting detainees from the
Geneva Conventions, thus enabling their
interrogation under conditions that blatantly
violated domestic and international laws.
Zero Dark Thirty accepts without
hesitation or question the importance of this
unconstitutional detention policy as crucial to
the torture program. From the very first days of
the war on terror, the US government rounded up
individuals globally and began to question them
brutally. Whether they actually had information to
reveal, whether the government had any concrete
evidence against them, the US authorities held
hundreds - in the end, thousands - of detainees in
custody at secret CIA black sites worldwide, in
the prisons of allied states known for their own
torture policies, at Bagram Detention Center in
Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo, which
was the crown jewel of the Bush administration's
offshore detention system.
Dan and Maya
themselves not only travel to secret black sites
to obtain valuable information from detainees, but
to the cages and interrogation booths at Bagram
where men in those now-familiar orange jumpsuits
are shown awaiting a nightmare experience.
Bigelow's film repeatedly suggests that it was
crucially important for national security to keep
a pool of potential information sources - those
detainees - available just in case they might one
day turn out to have information.
Third, indulge in the
horror: Torture is displayed on screen in
what can only be called pornographic detail for
nearly the film's first hour. In this way, Zero
Dark Thirty eerily mimics the obsessive,
essentially fetishistic approach of Bush's top
officials to the subject. Cheney, former secretary
of defense Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney's former chief
of staff, David Addington, and John Yoo from the
Office of Legal Counsel, among others, plunged
into the minutiae of "enhanced interrogation"
tactics, micro-managing just what levels of abuse
should and should not apply, would and would not
constitute torture after 9/11.
In black
site after black site, on victim after victim, the
movie shows acts of torture in detail, Bigelow's
camera seeming to relish its gruesomeness:
waterboarding, stress positions, beatings, sleep
deprivation resulting in memory loss and severe
disorientation, sexual humiliation, containment in
a small box, and more. Whenever she gets the
chance, Bigelow seems to take the opportunity to
suggest that this mangling of human flesh and
immersion in brutality on the part of Americans is
at least understandable and probably worthwhile.
The film's almost subliminal message on
the subject of torture should remind us of the way
in which a form of sadism-as-patriotic-duty
filtered down to the troops on the ground, as
evidenced by the now infamous 2004 photos from Abu
Ghraib of smiling American soldiers offering
thumbs-up responses to their ability to humiliate
and hurt captives in dog collars.
Fourth, dehumanize the
victims: Like the national security
establishment that promoted torture policies,
Bigelow dehumanizes her victims. Despite repeated
beatings, humiliations, and aggressive torture
techniques of various sorts, Ammar never becomes
even a faintly sympathetic character to anyone in
the film. As a result, there is never anyone for
the audience to identify with who becomes
emotionally distraught over the abuses.
Dehumanization was a necessary tool in promoting
torture; now, it is a necessary tool in promoting
Zero Dark Thirty, which desensitizes its
audience in ways that should be frightening to us
and make us wonder who exactly we have become in
the years since 9/11.
Fifth, never
doubt that torture works: Given all this,
it's a small step to touting the effectiveness of
torture in eliciting the truth. "In the end,
everybody breaks, bro': it's biology," Dan says to
his victim. He also repeats over and over, "If you
lie to me, I hurt you" - meaning, "If I hurt you,
you won't lie to me." Maya concurs, telling Ammar,
bruised, bloodied, and begging for her help, that
he can stop his pain by telling the truth.
How many times does the American public
need to be told that torture did not yield the
results the government promised? How many times
does it need to be said that waterboarding Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, 183 times
obviously didn't work? How many times does it need
to be pointed out that torture can - and did -
produce misleading or false information, notably
in the torture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the
Libyan who ran an al-Qaeda training camp in
Afghanistan and who confessed under torture that
there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Sixth, hold no one
accountable: The Obama administration made
the determination that holding Bush administration
figures, CIA officials, or the actual torturers
responsible for what they did in a court of law
was far more trouble than it might ever be worth.
Instead, the president chose to move on and
officially never look back.
Bigelow takes
advantage of this passivity to suggest to her
audience that the only downside of torture is the
fear of accountability. As he prepares to leave
Pakistan, Dan tells Maya, "You gotta be real
careful with the detainees now. Politics are
changing, and you don't want to be the last one
holding the dog collar when the oversight
committee comes...."
The sad truth is that
Zero Dark Thirty could not have been
produced in its present form if any of the
officials who created and implemented US torture
policy had been held accountable for what
happened, or any genuine sunshine had been thrown
upon it. With scant public debate and no public
record of accountability, Bigelow feels free to
leave out even a scintilla of criticism of that
torture program. Her film is thus one more example
of the fact that without accountability, the
pernicious narrative continues, possibly gaining
traction as it does.
Seventh, employ
the media: While the Bush administration
had the Fox television series 24 as a
weekly reminder that torture keeps us safe, the
current administration, bent on its
no-accountability policy, has Bigelow's film on
its side. It's the perfect piece of propaganda,
with all the appeal that naked brutality, fear,
and revenge can bring.
Hollywood and most of
its critics have embraced the film. It has already
been named among the best films of the year
and is considered a shoe-in for Oscar nominations
(it secured nominations for best picture,
best actress, film editing, sound editing and original
screenplay). Hollywood, that one-time bastion of
liberalism, has provided the final piece in the
perfect blueprint for the whitewashing of torture
policy. If that isn't a happy-ever-after ending,
what is?
Karen J Greenberg, a
TomDispatch regular, is the Director of the Center
on National Security at Fordham Law School. She is
the author of The Least Worst Place:
Guantanamo's First 100 Days and the co-editor
of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.
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